How does the Kalam Cosmological Argument define "God"? What are all the properties of "God," if there are finitely many?
Craig's formulation of that argument is really easy to pick apart. He basically doesn't offer a rationale for his first premise, and his dismissal of actual infinity isn't very well-supported.
I'm actually in the process of trying to leave atheism and find "God", although not the superstitious God of organized religions.
I believe God is an emergent property of advanced civilizations. You know how ants can build great societies even though not a single one of them has the concept of society, it's just several small parts working together to produce something greater than the whole?
That's what God is. I think every society is aware of this God though but lacked the means to express it so they created various superstitious ideas. A Muslim theologian called Avveros once said that "heaven" is just a metaphor for saying how your earthly accomplishments live on after death. Hell is a metaphor for how your bad deeds live off on after death too. I believe it's something like that.
>>444891
Eventually you'll realize why organized religion is an integral part of your theory and convert to Catholicism or Orthodoxy.
Elaborate what "higher theory" means. A stronger formal system? Higher order of logic?
Also why do you think the set of theories is countable and why do you think a limit exists?
What is the union of two theories? The set of sentences provable from both? Why do you think an arbitrary union of theories is well defined?
Please address these problems
>>444944
I've been studying both of those and find them primitive and superstitious. In general studying Catholic theology has shown me why organized religion is cancer. I think the men who came closest to identifying the true nature of God were Spinoza, Hegel, and Jung.
>>445008
I guess we're pretty much in agreement, but I think Spinoza is just a plebby Platonist trying to preserve Jewish values while eliminating Jewish culture. I don't get the hate for organized religion on your part, especially when Hegel literally advocated using the Prussian state church to enforce Prussian values and loyalty to the Prussian state.
>>444891
I personally think your theory places too much importance or focus on what life does.
>>444891
Study Western Esoteric Tradition
>>444270
>recursive definition on c_i
>c_0 undefined
>>445008
Can you explain Spinoza to us ?
Everyone goes on and on about how Spinoza's theology is so well supported and how he disbarred Scholasticism, but no one ever gets into to it and explains why we should buy into such propositions.
>>445008
It's common for atheists to find pantheism a great deal more personally convincing (for it remains absolutely amoral) and scientifically acceptable (since most people agree something like a universe exists).
What Catholic theology were you looking at which made you hate organized religion?
>>444891
read spinoza
>>445342
Very few people on this board have the fortitude to slog through original philosophical works, while many more lack the fortitude to refrain from name-dropping thinkers they have never read (or even read about in some cases).
I guess people don't care about my thread topic, what the fuck
>>445217
The pic didn't define c_i you tard. It's defining something else in terms of the c_i's
>>445397
fuck off c_i Is defined in terms of c_{i-1} which is called a recursively defined sequence and which should include a definition for c_0.
>>445399
How the fuck did you know that? Because that certainly isn't expressed in the pic, you dense faggot
>>445397
The whole fucking thing is a mathematical mess, it looks like a baby took a set theory class and tried to cry using its symbols.
There is no reason I can discern for why a limit is included... limits in a non-quantitative context... what the fuck is that supposed to mean? The sequence is not well defined even if we could have a c_0 since there are probably more than one "higher order theory" available at each turn... fuck this is making me so mad and fuck you for being such a piece of shit that you can't notice how bad it is and then that you had to pretend like you knew better than me you fucking wiener fuck you
>>445428
It's a retarded way theists try to be deep and use math
>>444270
I think that the KCA, as presented by Craig, just points to a first cause.He calls it "probable" that such a first cause is God.
If KCA is correct then it seems to me that one property God would lack would be omnipotence. KCA suggests that it is impossible for there to be a creation that is infinite in past time, insofar as if there was an infinity of past moments before our current one then we could have never reached this one, since you cannot traverse an infinity. From there we can say that because creation exists a finite amount of time ago, then something must have caused it to exist at that finite amount of time ago that it began.
But this seems to presuppose that God exists in time- having made his creation at a particular time. And if God cannot create an infinite series of time, and is bound by the dictates of time in this way- it seems that God is in many ways not as ultimate and omnipotent as he is suppose to be in traditional theology, which only binds him according to logical contradiction as opposed to something metaphysically oriented like time- something he ought to be the author of.
As Aquinas points out: the whole point of an infinite past series is not that there is some "infinitieth" member that we move from to get to our current state- traversing an infinite like that would indeed be impossible. We can have made it to such a time as the present. It is enough to say that if we take any member of the infinite series that there is a finite amount of time between that moment and our current one. From any place in the infinite series of past moments there is only a finitude to traverse. So there is no reason to claim that creation does not go back infinitely in past time. The argument presupposes a first moment so to argue for one.
Rather we should say that God created time with the world, being only ontologically prior, and not temporally prior, to both. With this world he could have created an infinite or finite temporal series.
>>444270
>>444270
>>444270
God is in all beings and also outside all beings. You can see God in events in daily life and also in other people who do what is most righteous.
What is infinite and expanding, God, for where is the end of your perceived universe?
What is non-physical? Spirit, and that is in all living entities, which makes them separate from mere materials, and when we exit the body we experience life outside of the physical.
>he is unknowable
>he is all the gods rolled into one
Not all the little gods care about the One God
>who is the One God kek silly Christian
It is easy to think that God is the top of the latter, above creation, above all perceptions, but you can know Him.
God also has a personality, and He does not change, but the secrets are for you to discover, not to be handed to you so you can be spoon-fed your spirituality, because where is the fun in that?
>>445217
Yeah, though as something of a "God Function" it's kind of amusing. Almost an "assemble your own deity" thing.
"Come up with an i_0, recursively develop it (how exactly? Lol), and boom your own custom made God!"
It's like Hegel for Dummies.
>>445478
No, when you define a recursive sequence (a sequence where each a_n depends on a_(n-1) ) you MUST define the first term, or else the thing won't build.
>>445498
How do you know the c_i's are defined in terms of c_i-1? Did the picture tell you that, or did you pull it out of you ass?
>>445428
God is the set that contains the limit of the sequence C_i. C_i is a recursive sequence of concepts that is only partially defined here as the sequence where each member is a higher concept than the previous. This implies that concepts can be ordered by a transitive and reflexive "higher" relation. For any given concept there might be more than one higher concept, but that's not a problem since we can construct the sequence for each index i by picking a random element from the set of concepts higher than c_{i-1}. Proving the limit exists would just be a constructive proof similar to how one would prove that a set A being dense in the reals implies that every real number is the limit of a sequence in A.
>>445375
So why don't you fucking explain it?
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. -Exodus 3:14
Anything more would be reducing the infinite to finite, and would be a flawed definition.
>>445516
Not the guy you're responding to, but it's literally what the formula states.
It involves an infinite progression towards a limit with a sequence of Cs starting with C_0 taking each term of the sequence in order such that C_i is a "greater theory" than C_i-1.
>>445516
it's pointless arguing about this garbage math... nothing it says makes sense.
I thought it was saying "Take the union of a family of sets called c indexed over i where the each c_i is recursively defined in terms of c_i-1 by the rule that ci is "higher" than c_i-1" but now I'm looking at it and I can't even figure out what their intended meaning was.
>>445522
But what about the union indexed over c? And I don't see how a limit would exist. A limit in the reals is itself a real. What is a limit in this context? I mean, what kind of object is it?
You know the epsilon criteria for limit conversion in analysis? That relies on a notion of quantity which is nowhere implied here.
The whole thing, at least without the context, is not worth discussing.
>>445559
"Higher" is a meaningless qualifier in this context, so you can't assume whether that the sequence is recursively defined or not. There's no reason to believe that the qualifier requires the sequence to be recursive.
>>445568
Limits can be defined in a topological space, and it need not be contained in itself. x is a limit point of X if all of its neighborhoods intersect X. R is a special topological space which is closed and complete, so any of it's Cauchy sequenves have limits in R. This implies that the set of all theories is a topolgical space (which is unlikely).
The problem then becomes the definition of arbitrary unions of these limit points, which requires the open set axiom. What we can assume is that each of the points c are actually subsets of some set X when given a topology, i.e. c is in P(X). Usually P(X) inherits a regular topology from X if X is uniform, not just a topology, so the problem becomes to endow X, which has "theories" c as subsets, with a unuform topology.
>>445608
Don't you have homework to do? Or is doing an analysis review and taking a mangled bit of set theory on /his/ seriously your idea of funny irony?
>>445686
>homework
Do you even know what date it is?
>analysis
No one is talking about analysis you retard.
![[FFF] Nisekoi S2 - 05 [16EABA16].mkv_snapshot_01.12_[2015.05.17_16.16.55].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/m42mCkc.jpg "[FFF] Nisekoi S2 - 05 [16EABA16].mkv_snapshot_01.12_[2015.05.17_16.16.55].jpg")
>implying God can be encompassed and even defined in terms of humanly conceivable ideas
>let along by a shittily constructed expression as in OP's pic
>>445886
Then how can God even be discussed and how can we know what we're talking about if we can't even define it?
>>446034
now you're getting it
>>445342
Spinoza is as followed.
*All laws of nature or just different perspectives, or interpretations of the one universial law. This law is God.
*The difference between one 'object' or 'thing' is a human construction. In reality there is only one thing which is an infinite connected 'everything' that extends from one end of the universe to another.
*The universe is absolutly everything. There is no 'other world' or 'outside the universe' because the universe is literally a set that contains all other sets. All those other sets divisions are a human concept.
As for the point on Scholasticism. Spinoza is a hero who took centuries of Scholastic mumbo jumbo and turned into it something that made sense. He got rid of pointless distinctions and showed that the remaining distinctions were merely human-made perspectives. He single-handed rescued metaphysics from the corruption of the Catholics and returned it to a form that is actually usful and coherent. At last we stop viewing God as some 'other'; and as something inseperatly connected to humanity. God is bond to humans tighter than a mother's embrace, it is the inseparable thread that binds reality together.
>>445371
>What Catholic theology were you looking at which made you hate organized religion?
All of it. Catholic theology wants to monopolize the rights to certain philosophical ideas (morality, metaphysics etc.) and say it can't step outside dogma. Everything that contradicts dogma is axiomatically wrong. In proper philosophy all must be questioned the statements. I view scholasticism as anti-philosophy. Thomas Aquinas himself said that philosophy was stupid because it operated outside theology. Scholastism was justified by one thing and one thing along: Spinoza. The first, greatest, and last scholastic philosopher.
>>446124
I was looking for actual arguments for his conclusions. Not just his conclusions, which I am familiar with. I want to know why I should buy into them.
>Spinoza is a hero who took centuries of Scholastic mumbo jumbo and turned into it something that made sense.
Can you give some examples? What aspects of scholasticism are incoherent? And whose Scholasticism ? Unless you are critiquing Aristotle then you will have to specify what points of unity you see between Thomist, Scottist, Ockhamist, etc schools.
>He got rid of pointless distinctions and showed that the remaining distinctions were merely human-made perspectives.
Scholastics had been utilizing the term "distinction of reason" for a long time. A large amount of scholastic work in distinctions was showing that certain things come from us considering things in certain ways. Which distinctions in Scholasticism were pointless ?
>He single-handed rescued metaphysics from the corruption of the Catholics and returned it to a form that is actually usful and coherent.
Again, examples?
>At last we stop viewing God as some 'other'; and as something inseperatly connected to humanity. God is bond to humans tighter than a mother's embrace, it is the inseparable thread that binds reality together.
Ok, but why is this a good thing and why should I buy into it ?
>In proper philosophy all must be questioned the statements
How do you guard against an infinite regress or circular reasoning then ? Does Spinoza have zero first principles ?
>>446227
>proofs?
Me
I'm god
Hi guise :3
>>444270
it doesn't matter how because it's not falsifiable
you could define god as a rainbow colored unicorn
>>445008
Can you refute this picture?
>>445375
you seem to fall into the latter id presume
>>446427
>There must be an end to the chain of actuals-potentials
Hhahahahaha no! Its goes in a circle you stupid fuck!!!
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed.
>>446733
I think you need to read the argument more carefully before you post. How can it go in a circle in a single instant ? If A is actualizing B, B is actualizing C, and C is actualizing A, then A is actualizing A. If A is such that it gains its actuality derivatively then for A to be actual it must get it's actuality from somewhere else, so it can't be actualizing itself.
>>446357
Please. We hear so much of the narrative about Spinoza owning the Scholastics from Spinoza-anons, I would like to see this narrative substantiated with serious philosophical content.
>>446427
Don't need to, David Hume already did it for me
>>446837
Isnt that something that can only be done by wholly rejecting causation?
>>444270
I'm not a smart man, but i always imagine god as a writer, and everything in this universe is his book. He know how it's started and he knows how it's end. We as a character inside the book, still need to walk the plot that the gods write. And when the god talk to his prophets, i just treated it as god breaking the fourth wall.
Is frodo knows that the world he lived in is created by tolkiens? Is he knew what/who tolkien is? Or he even exist at all?
>>447032
>I'm not a smart man, but i always imagine god as a writer, and everything in this universe is his book.
It shows.
*The Goddess
>>444270
>no base case for c_0
enjoy unrolling that c_i recursive relation
>>444270
Absoluteness; anything else would be limiting. Something self-extant; without precedence and sovereign
I am a pantheist so all that exists.
>>446427
Is there anything to refute?
It's based on physics that are very out of date.
This is fine with Newtonian physics but once you get higher I can't imagine how this functions.
Meta-physics is not seperate from physics, it's literally meta-thinking about physics. If Aquinas model is based on Aristotelian or Newtonian physics than it's simply not meta-physics. It exists in vacuum that has no meaning outside of the paper it's written on.
As for the metaphysics them-self I fail to see how they are useful. Avicenna had a similar model but his model had a subtle difference that forced God to be made of exactly one trait, therefor refuting the trinity. Other than defining God into existence in a method that allows the trinity what does this model actually accomplish? What explanatory power does it have? If you can't answer that than you can just accuse the whole model of being meaningless language games.
>>446830
Yes, but physics tells us that energy does not get created. This a law of nature. Energy can only transform from one state into the other.
From the chemical energy in the petroleum to electrical energy in the powerplant, to thermal energy in the refrigerator, etc. And if you look at the source of that chemical energy you will find the sun is responsible. So is the Sun god? Nobody gives energy to the sun but itself....
>>447883
>It's based on physics that are very out of date.
This is fine with Newtonian physics but once you get higher I can't imagine how this functions.
The other poster in that image argues that its not the case and that it seems that rejecting Aquinas on that has more to do with Dogmatism than reason
>>449108
What does the law of conservation of energy have to do with this? Could you please explain why you brought it up? I often hear people mention it in theological debates but they rarely say why it should pose a problem for theists.
As for your claim that the Sun receives energy only from itself, I think you should clarify what you mean. The sun, though it is a unitary body, is better described as a complex system of chemical and physical and so on reactions and relations. The Sun receives energy from fusion reactions and the transformation of hydrogen into helium and vice versa. Although these are contained within this system, can we really say the Sun receives energy from itself? We can trace these reactions, and the energy associated with them, back to something other than the system itself. Its elements, and also the conditions in which it formed, are responsible for the energy that enters and leaves the system. Could you explain why we should take your claim at face value, especially when you confuse the predicates of God (a necessary being) with the predicates of the Sun (a contingent being)?
>>449108
That is irrelevant because you've made a logical error, as my post pointed out. You still aren't engaging with Aquinas' argument either.
The question you have to ask is why energy it stay maintained like that in the first place ?, what is even allowing energy to exist in the first place? That is closer to what this argument is about.
Remember, the first cause is the first cause acting at each moment, it is not necessarily a temporal first cause. Now you are presumably trying to say that the sun is the first cause, but this can't hold, because for energy to change from one location and form to another through the sun the sun would have to have potency change so to grant this energy to others, and the argument grounds it that what ever the first cause is has to be pure actuality, it can't change. So insofar as the sun changes in its energy granting activity( which we know it does) it can't be the first cause, something has to be "moving" the sun for it to act in the way physics describes it to us. It's the same thing if you use "energy" or "the universe" as the first cause, they all change and hence can't be the first cause.
People get confused about what "laws of nature" are, they aren't proper explanations, they are just our ways of unifying individual phenomena into a generality. They are constructed by us. The phenomena itself is the ground for the "laws of nature" , not the other way around.Invoking a law of nature does nothing to answer these kind of metaphysical questions.
>>447883
The thing is, Aristotelian "physics" has a different function from modern physics. It functions more like a metaphysics of nature than a set of mechanistic abstractions that are useful for experiments. Aristotelian physics is about getting the principles of how nature works, these principles are more general than the particular formulations we call "physics"- which just abstracts mathematical regularities out of real phenomena, hence its priority to those formulations.
Aquinas' God is also wholly simple. There are different formulations of the Trinity that account for how God can be totally simple and three at the same time. Scotus' account nails it.
>What explanatory power does it have?
It gives a proper account of how we have causation and change in the world.
God is the uncaused cause.
There either has to be an eternal God that created this finite and limited reality we call the universe.
Or there has to be no life at all. Nothing should exist.
>>446427
Here, let me.
>God is claimed immaterial
>God interacts with the material world.
There, two contradictory statements. Your image is debunked
>>449639
How is that a contradiction? Are you a mouth breathing Cartesian dualist or something?
>>449639
I made a carboard box.
I am outside of it, but can interact with the inside of the box.
How is that contradictory? Retard.
>>449311
>This is fine with Newtonian physics but once you get higher I can't imagine how this functions.
It doesn't function. Aquinas is a joke.
>>449586
In regards to meta-physics the way it has always been applied is first one learns physics than one applys meta-physics to it to find deeper meaner which you applied. Unless you are willing to apply Aquinas to real physics it cannot even be considered meta-physics, it's scribbles on paper that relate to nothing. But once you apply him to real physics he becomes objectivily wrong.
His understanding is not comptable with relativity.
>It gives a proper account of how we have causation and change in the world.
It doesn't as I've explained.
>Aquinas' God is also wholly simple
No it isn't he needs to make up entirely new terms that completely fuck with basic concepts of reality just to get him to exist. For example "an immaterial thing that interacts with material things "a God that has two separate natures one material one immaterial but they are actually the same thing except they aren't". How the fuck does he even define "perfect"? I'll tell you how he backtracks into Aristotle, makes a giant mess and than dogmatically inserts Christian ideas about morality into it and declares that's what it means to be perfect.
Aquinas God is self-referring nightmare of paradoxes.
>>450181
See the 5th and 8th paragraphs
>>445608
Ok, so if we assume that the above statement holds if and only if the set of all theories is a topological space, then I propose we start with a collection of semicategories with some collection of morphism and try and work our way back to a set.
Any idea what the fuck unitarity means in the context of theories?
>>450193
Except these don't address anything. His definations are based on word-games.
I'll start with omnipotent.
The God Aquinas describes is actually weaker than Spinoza's God. Why? Because Spinoza's God is a set that contains all sets. Aquina's God is part of the set (whether he is a real thing or only an imagined idea). There for Aquina's God is simple a an aspect of the greater Spinozian God. Literally any attribute Aquina's God has. Spinoza's will also have plus more.
>omnispresent
God is knowledge itself.
Again I can invoke Spinoza and say his God is wiser. But I'll settle for pointing out that knowledge as a Platonic form is retarded. Do you honestly beleive that there is a platonic form of the konami code that is identifiably with the Christian God?
>eternal
God changes, for instance he goes from the state of not having died on the cross to having died on the cross. This violates the principles of eternity. The only way to have eternity is to deny change, which only works with monism, which goes back to Spinoza's God
etc. etc.
>>449672
That's not contradictory. Do you know what immaterial is?
>>450193
Modern physics would like to say hello to aquinas; all of the below has been experimentally observed and matches with current theory.
Here we have things that exist without a causal creation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle
And here we have spontaneous decays without an external motivating factor. In the nonsense aquinas proposes; the actual is realised from the potential without the action of another actor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_decay
God is an excuse.
>>450273
Zero-point energy is caused and actualized by quantum corrections to classical vacua and particle decay is caused by the electro-weak interactions.
Virtual particles aren't actual. They're not gauge invariant so they can't be physical.
Don't try to rope physics into philosophical arguments. It'll make you look like a retard.
>>450181
>In regards to meta-physics the way it has always been applied is first one learns physics than one applys meta-physics to it to find deeper meaner which you applied.
But metaphysics( and Aristotle's philosophy of nature, which is most of what his "physics are") is prior to physics. If physics doesn't correspond to good metaphysics then it would be irrational. Metaphysics gives us our general principles about being qua being, where physics just gives us mathematical abstractions that picks out particular contingent aspects of the world. You are extending the role of modern physics way past what it is capable of.
You have to show A. how modern physics actually contradicts Aquinas' metaphysics, which you have yet to do, and B. if they do contradict it why we should treat our modern physics as having priority to Aquinas' metaphysics, something which you have asserted but have yet to back up with an argument.
Now given that I give priority to fundamental metaphysics and you give priority to modern physics the only way to solve such a dispute is to use reason to compare the two disciplines. From this point forward I would ask that you stop appealing to the authority of physics and argue on neutral terms. This means providing arguments for why you are putting forward the propositions that you do, rather than just asserting them.
>For example "an immaterial thing that interacts with material things "a God that has two separate natures one material one immaterial..
Where do you get this from ? Do you mean how God is also Jesus ? Jesus is not the one who constantly upholds the world at each moment, that is still God as the father.
The problem here is that you are stuck in Cartesian dualism, matter simpliciter is nothing, material things only exist according to their form. It is the immaterial forms that interact with each other primarily as substances of form and matter, matter is always derivative to the form and the substances that they constitute.
>>450296
IT'S CALLED META-PHYSICS
its the meta of physics!
You literally cannot discuss meta-physics without involving physics! If you do not involve physics you are not doing meta-physics. You have essentially admitted that Thomas Aquinas is not a meta-physian and not a philosopher because he refuses to involve himself with the subject (and Aquinas himself said he was no philosopher, he saw philosophy as a waste of time because religion already explained everything.) Do no retroactivily try to turn him into a philosopher, he was a theologian that dabbled in Aristotle.
>>450323
>You literally cannot discuss meta-physics without involving physics!
You don't know anything about the history of philosophy, do you?
>>450316
>Where do you get this from ? Do you mean how God is also Jesus ? Jesus is not the one who constantly upholds the world at each moment, that is still God as the father.
I can refute you in one of two ways. I can either point out that Aquina's God refers to the whole trinity which includes Jesus.
OR I can point out how to making a distinction between Jesus and his father violates God's oness which Aquinas insists on having.
I'm sorry but if you want Aquina's God you cannot have Jesus die on the cross because there would have to be a time when he was NOT on the cross which means a part of God has changed, which by Aquina's own rules says he is no longer eternal.
>>450323
Are you seriously this braindead? How the fuck do you even breathe leaving your mother's womb? Even if your stance on how metaphysics is practiced is correct everything you've raised above does not in anyway contradict Aquinas. There'll always be causes to physical phenomenon.
>>450296
Hahaha, ok, you tried.
"Quantum corrections to classical vacua", classical phenomena are approximations to quantum events, we phrase the notion as a "quantum correction" because when you do the mathematics (i.e. calculate the S matrix for the interaction), you're forced to add the correction in.
"Particle decay is caused by electro weak interactions", no, that's an interaction or a scattering, particle decay is X -> A,B. It follows a poisson distribution and is thus verifiably random. In some decay events, you get electro weak gauge bosons as an intermediary decay step, for example neutron decays. There is no external causal body that instigates the decay process.
Virtual particles are observable phenomena, every single time you want a scattering event using weak interactions you either have a virtual particle or violate energy conservation. Or are you suddenly claiming that Aquinas only applies to gauge invariant particles?
>>450340
>making a distinction between Jesus and his father violates God's oness which Aquinas insists on having.
Aquinas isn't a Muslim or a Unitarian. Trinitarianism necessarily distinguishes between the three divine hypostases which consist of one divine substance.
>>450345
As this guy pointed out
>>450348
Aquinas argument is dead in the water the moment real physics are introduced. As i said before his argument literally only works on paper. The first mover argument is objectively wrong because objects self-move.
You can use Aquinas however you want but you can't use it to refer to matter and energy without it running into a contradiction.
>>450348
Holy fuck you can't be serious
>denying that a perturbative scheme of calculating matrices QFT can be qualified as a cause of the zero point energy
>fundamentally misunderstands the mechanics of particle decay
>doesn't actually know what virtual particles are and what the definition of an observable is
And I suppose you think Fadeev-Poppov ghosts are observable as well? Stop embarrassing yourself kid
>>450257
>His definations are based on word-games
Elaborate on this.
>Omnipotence
Omnipotence is about power, what you've described is about size and identity. God has infinite power that isn't bound by anything. Given that all else in creation has its power derived from God it follows that all power in the totality is Gods in Aquinas' metaphysics. Spinozas God and Aquinas' God would be equal on this front. Spinoza's God has the power of the whole insofar as it is the whole, God has the power of the whole insofar as all power is derivative from him.
> But I'll settle for pointing out that knowledge as a Platonic form is retarded
This is not an argument.
>eternal
Christ has a human nature that changed, but Christ as the word is eternal. Only the latter is God. Father who creates the world has one eternal act that spreads out to all times- monism is not required in order to ground God's eternity.
>>450273
You have to give a reason why we should judge modern physics as having a greater say in our ontology than Aquinas' metaphysics, and show how our results in modern physics act as a complete ontology that don't need metaphysics to supplement it. As mentioned here >>450316
You will have to deal with the argument against self change in order to demonstrate that what you have linked from wikipedia is a complete ontological account.
[P1] The subject of a change must be in potency to ϕ. (Definition of change)
[P2] Causes must “contain”(relate to) their effects. (Causal Axiom 1)
[P3] Hence the cause of a change must be in act with respect to ϕ. (From [A2] and the definition of change)
[P4] Proximate causes must be spatio-temporally concurrent with their immediate effects. (Causal Axiom 2)
[P5] It is impossible for one and the same thing to be at once in potency and act with respect to the same and according to the same (Application of the Law of Non-Contradiction to potency and act)
[C] Therefore: Anything that changes must be changed by another.
>>450377
>denying that a perturbative scheme of calculating matrices QFT can be qualified as a cause of the zero point energy
No, that isnt what I said at all; in fact my statement was that adding in the pertubation terms is how we calculate the zero point energy, the point I'm making is that the physical notion of zero point energy is that it's an uncaused local fluxuation. Stop being an idiot and claiming that perturbation theory is causing zero point energy rather than being a tool used to calculate it.
>misunderstands particle decay
No, you were confusing scattering and decay events earlier, you're quite clearly retarded
>Virtual particles and observable
If you want to be strict about it, virtual particles are non observable, but the action of them is observable, hence I used the term observable phenomena. But my point stands, virtual particles exist and their lack of gauge invariance gets us around all sorts of horrible things during particle interactions.
While we're at it; let's start up with vacuum polarization too, because that's also fun. Just to detail the notion before you attempt to misrepresent every third word I put down; I have some photon travelling in space, at some point it becomes an electron positron pair before self annihilating and resuming as a photon. Aquinas requires an external motivator to move from potential to actual, so what was the motivator that caused the vacuum polarization event?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_polarization
>>450429
>If you want to be strict about it, virtual particles are non observable, but the action of them is observable, hence I used the term observable phenomena
You're aware of the way in which Kant distinguished between noumena and phenomena centuries ago, right?
>>450323
It is called metaphysics because the Aristotelian work "metaphysics" was written after the physics. It is well established that the material on the metaphysics is ontologically prior to the material in the physics.
No one said not to involve physics at all, but what discipline needs to be reconciled with the other and in which way is a whole different story.
>>450340
> Point 1.
Jesus has two natures, the human nature changes while the divine nature does not. The divine nature is identical with God, not the human nature. This point is a failure.
>point 2
The members of the trinity have a formal distinction, but not a real one. They are simultaneously one under one aspect and distinct under another. See next post.
>>450451
Real Relation: The relation of things considered in their separability. Def “ Separable”: When x and y are conjoined to one another, if x could exist in a case where y did not then x is separable from y, and if y could exist in a case where x did not then y is separable from x.
Real Distinction: If the two things considered could exist separately from one another, I.E. one could exist in a counterfactual situation where the other did not, then there is a real distinction between them. To be really identical is to have the opposite of this condition hold between what we are considering as differentiated.
Formal Relation: A relation considered only in qualitative difference, a weaker kind of relation than a real relation.
Formal Distinction: If things have distinct qualities from each other, though this difference does not go as far as real seperability, then there is a formal distinction between them.
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>>450456
The Father, Son and, Holy Spirit are all formally distinct from each other. There are qualitative differences between the persons. These differentiating qualities are incommunicable between the persons. The father is defined by its creation and spiration, the son by being created and spirating., and the Holy Ghost by being spirated. The “is not” relationship between the three persons to each other holds. The act of creation is not a substantial generation, but rather the father atemporally communicating and informing ( I.E. the relationship implied by communicating and informing in our prima facie experience holds without a temporal process- only the actual foundational and simultaneous ontological dependency that is the core of the relationship holds) the essence of God in such a way that the Son is created and the Holy Spirit is spirated.
The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all share in God’s essence though, and without God’s essence they could not be. There is no possibility that any of them could exist if God considered in his essence did not, they are not seperable from it. The “is” relation that each person has with God is a real identity relationship, as the persons could not exist apart from the essence of God.
Thus each person maintains a formal degree of inequality from each other, while all being really equal to God.
Now while God may have several formalities predicated of him, this does not imply that these formalities are parts. Especially since the formalities are inseparable from one another. This is not just in regards to the identity of the being they constitute, like in how my disassembling a desk will make it no longer be a desk, but in that what we are talking about cannot even be separated into parts so to destroy the thing they constitute.
God and Christ are both identical and distinct depending on how we consider them. Your second point is a failure.
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>>450421
>Spinoza's God has the power of the whole insofar as it is the whole, God has the power of the whole insofar as all power is derivative from him.
You've got it reverse. Your Go is derivative of Spinoza's God. That's the point. The only way to escape monoism is to view things from perspectives. God has his perspective (or he may have infinite ones if you wish) and in this way he can differentiate himself from other things. Himself and whatever he differentiates himself from are derivative of Spinoza's God.
For instance the concept of 'power' is inside Aquina's God. But power is also in other things. That concept of 'power' is one whole concept that exists in all things that have power. Spinoza's God is that power but he is also every other thing you could possible imagine. He is the whole everything.
This is what is brutal about Spinoza, he dethroned the Christian God. God's power, wisdom, goodness, and whatever traits you want are just derivatives.
The religious apologists are far more adept at defending the existence of God than the atheists are at debunking him.
I've listened to debates between atheists and theists and the theists tend to have much better arguments. Now many of the atheists in these debates are the New Atheists, and many other atheists find their arguments to be poor. Most atheists do not even bother to argue with theists because the idea of an intelligent creator god who interacts with his people and wroughts miracles is so blatantly counter-intuitive to the modern mind that it hardly seems worth the effort to refute. We have moved so far past the sort of arguments used by theists that very few people are able to refute them outright, that is, on their grounds. And it is not just that the theists dig up archaic metaphysics to defend their god, but that they must be much more clever and well-read in order to sound credible. The atheists use modern, sterile, and scientific language, but the ancient sounding and eloquent theists woo the contrarians and those who are old-fashioned at heart.
Really, fedoras need to shut their mouths and not get caught up in the theist's entanglements. Most good atheists just ignore theists. Although, if there is an atheist who operates on the level of the theist apologists, I would encourage him.
>>450466
That doesn't make any difference in regards to actual power though.
>For instance the concept of 'power' is inside Aquina's God. But power is also in other things. That concept of 'power' is one whole concept that exists in all things that have power. Spinoza's God is that power but he is also every other thing you could possible imagine.
In Aquinas' ontology all power is derived from God, everything's existence is derived from God, etc. Spinoza's God having identity with things that God has priority to is meaningless to the question who has more power. They would have an equal amount of power insofar as the power of the whole that Spinoza's God is is also the same power that Aquinas' God is/has. Literally every property that another creature has is just derived from God anyways. There is nothing to add on to Spinoza's God except identity.
Likewise I see no reason to buy into this argument that everything has the same identity,and that divisions are only a human perspective. That certainly needs to be argued for.
>>450421
>You have to give a reason why we should judge modern physics as having a greater say in our ontology than Aquinas' metaphysics, and show how our results in modern physics act as a complete ontology that don't need metaphysics to supplement it.
No I dont, I'm not even arguing the lack of a required metaphysics, I just need evidence that contradicts some element of Aquinas' metaphysics. Modern physics is clearly not a complete ontology and I hope it never is.
>[P4] Proximate causes must be spatio-temporally concurrent with their immediate effects. (Causal Axiom 2)
Violated by quantum entanglement; I entangle two particles, move them to a great enough distance and perform a unitary operation on one, this performs the unitary operation on the other and is measurable outside the causal light cone. What is prohibited by this is transfer of information outside my light cone.
>[P5] It is impossible for one and the same thing to be at once in potency and act with respect to the same and according to the same (Application of the Law of Non-Contradiction to potency and act)
I see no reason this statement should hold
>[C]
I have a particle, it spontaneously decays, the probability of decay is determined by a poisson distribution. Even better we can use a case study in vacuum polarisation; a photon spontaneously becomes an electron and a positron before they become a photon again. And the wonderful thing is that momentum and velocity of the photon is preserved, if there was an external actor this would not hold and we would be able to observe the action of whatever caused the change from photon to positron and electron.
But we dont, and for 50 years of trying, we havent.
>>450436
I work in physics not philosophy, enlighten me
>>450509
>Likewise I see no reason to buy into this argument that everything has the same identity,and that divisions are only a human perspective. That certainly needs to be argued for.
It's actually a pretty easy position. Because the monism is just another perspective. Here's the bit.
You cannot escape perspective, everything is going to be a subject-object relationship. Just try to imagine an object without a subject (you can't because you yourself are the subject). Even is the subject is not alive this still applies. There is however one and only way to break perspectivism, to escape the subject-object relationship: to remove the subject distinction, to have all be one.
As for the part on the power can you clarrify what Aquinas means by power?
>There is nothing to add on to Spinoza's God except identity.
Again you are reversing it. Spinoza's God is the original. Identifying Aquinas God is being distinct from other things (for instance those without power) is a distinction that involves a subject object relationship and thus is derivative of Spinoza's God. To recap there is the one God who is everything without distinction, to create distinction we use perspective and is derived from Spinoza's God.
>>450517
>I see no reason this statement should hold
Well ok if you think that basic logical principles like the principle of non-contradiction don't need to hold then I'm sure where this debate can go. According to you none of your other statements hold then. You are literally claiming that "x is P and not P" in unequivocal terms is a valid sentence.
> I just need evidence that contradicts some element of Aquinas' metaphysics
Yes but this is where your problem is. If we find that physics has uncaused phenomena or causes that are not spatio-temporally concurrent with their effect, then you have to demonstrate why we should treat this as representing the real phenomena, rather than just a limit in what physics can tell us about that phenomena.
> And the wonderful thing is that momentum and velocity of the photon is preserved, if there was an external actor this would not hold and we would be able to observe the action of whatever caused the change from photon to positron and electron.
How is this consequent determined ? How do you determine that Gods causal activity would be determinable in the same way a creatures activity would. If God is the first cause who is acting at every moment then we would have no means to determine how something would be like apart from God acting on it, so we would only be able to tell the difference between a thing that was acted on by God and a thing acted on by God and creatures. The evidence doesn't actually point us in either direction.
>>450552
>You cannot escape perspective, everything is going to be a subject-object relationship.
I see no reason to hold this, the fact that it is subjects who perceive objects tells us nothing about whether an object could exist without a perceiving subject. You are conflating epistemic conditions with metaphysical ones.
>There is however one and only way to break perspectivism, to escape the subject-object relationship: to remove the subject distinction, to have all be one.
This doesn't show that metaphysically everything is one.
So as long as there is still a subject who is considering everything as one then it is still a perspective if anything that comes from a subject viewing the world is, like what was claimed in your first argument.
So either we admit that 1. metaphysically you can have objectivity even though epistemically we always have to filter through subjectivity to get there. Or 2. Deny 1 and claim that if something is viewed by a subject then we are stuck in an subject.object distinction and admit that even when one decides to merely consider everything as one that this is still a perspective, and has no more validity than the perspective that maintains diversity.
Power is efficacy, that capacity/ability to affect things. But that is just talking about power by what results from it. It is a primitive notion ultimately.
> Again you are reversing it. Spinoza's God is the original
In Spinoza's ontology maybe, but we are arguing between the two of them. This just assumes that Spinoza has the right one from the get go, it is circular reasoning.
As far as I can see the argument doesn't work at all.
>>450639
Just because you can concieve the idea that there are multiple perspectives and that an absense of perspective is the state of everything being one...doesn't mean that your indivual perspective is the 'correct one'.
We live in a relative universe.
I'll give you an idea. How fast are you moving right now? Are you moving very slow because you are sitting down, or are you moving at hundreds of miles per hour because the earth is moving, or are you moving at thousands of miles per hour because the galaxy is spinning? The correct answer is all of the above. There is no objective truth about motion, there are only multiple subjective truths. This is going to be true with everything.
Relativity and perspective is an unavoidable part of reality. Einstein showed us this. This is why Spinoza has is beautiful and can flourish in all sorts of ways. Quite simply you cannot escape perspective.
The special perspective, that there is no subject-object distinction between there is only one subject and one object (which are one in the same) is based on Spinoza slowly breaking apart distinctions as being something subjective rather than objective.
>>450741
>Just because you can concieve the idea that there are multiple perspectives and that an absense of perspective is the state of everything being one...doesn't mean that your indivual perspective is the 'correct one
This is exactly my point against Spinoza. He doesn't escape epsitemic subject/object relationships just by positing monism. He says " If everything was one then we would go beyond the subject/object distinction" but that is worlds away from am argument that everything is in fact one.
>I'll give you an idea. How fast are you moving right now?
You just gave a non perspective based truth: That there are multiple different orders of motion that we can measure a mobile by at once. All you've shown is that " how fast are you moving" is an ambiguous question.
>Relativity and perspective is an unavoidable part of reality
Because ?
>Einstein showed us this.
An appeal to authority is not an argument.
>The special perspective, that there is no subject-object distinction between there is only one subject and one object (which are one in the same) is based on Spinoza slowly breaking apart distinctions as being something subjective rather than objective.
But how does he do this?, what are his actual arguments for his conclusion that everything is actually one ? Just positing that such a reality could break free from subject/object duality doesn't actually ground that it is true.
>>451374
>An appeal to authority is not an argument.
Are you actually implying that the the laws of physics are now an appeal to authority?
>Because ?
Look up Einstein's relativity, oh wait...that's an appeal to authority. I forgot physics is bullshit and only the bible counts.
>what are his actual arguments for his conclusion that everything is actually one
The short answer is that distinctions between various items are not objective. The long answer involves having to read the Ethics. You are basically asking me to explain some 100 pages in a short post on 4chan. This means you have to accept that you will get a very dumbed down version or read it yourself.
>>451439
I'm implying that you should actually explain these what these "laws of physics" are , why we should buy into them, why they are problematic to our metaphysics, and why we should afford them the place in our ontology that you do.
Just vaguely saying: "there is a law against that" doesn't demonstrate anything. Just saying " relativity is a part of our reality" is incredibly vague, it doesn't tell us anything, you should be able to actually explain something if you are going to invoke it in your argument.
There is a great example why invocations of scientific laws against Thomism falls in the image here >>446427
Newton's inertial laws are often used a way to show that objects don't require a cause for each moment of continued motion( hence no need for a conserving first mover). The problem with this line of thought is that inertial laws only actually tell us that bodies seem to move until they meet resistance. They do not explain to us why it is that they do this or how such a world comes about and is maintained. Newton himself never claimed that he had the “why” or "how" questions answered with his physics, he actually agreed with Aquinas on that front. Ultimately physics is just a means to systematize phenomena by abstracting from them in a quantifiable way. Phenomena can never be explained by physics, because physics is just a reformulation of phenomena into a mathematical abstractions, the phenomena is the ground of the laws, rather than the other way around. And that phenomena requires ontology to be explained.
> I forgot physics is bullshit and only the bible counts.
I'm pro-physics, which is why I'm against people misappropriating it. Modern physics is powerful because it has carved out its own niche apart from traditional philosophical issues. When people try to import physics into ontology inappropriately they are doing it a disfavor.
Also, I have never appealed to the bible for an argument, you are being radically disingenuous now.
>>451439
>This means you have to accept that you will get a very dumbed down version or read it yourself.
It also took Thomas 100+ pages to demonstrate Gods existence, but if people press us on these issues we do our best to explain them and make a case according to actual arguments. If Christians and their allies never said anything in these debates but " Go read Aquinas, you are wrong", or " Well if you read the Reportatio you would know that..." or " Never mind that, Anselm concluded that God exists so thats all that matters", it would be considered lazy and everyone would think that it suggests a lack of understanding of their own position. So why should those who uphold scientism or Spinoza's philosophy be given any more lenience ? If you are going to debate you should be able to defend your position.
We have even more reason to ask that people really demonstrate their positions because so many times people will invoke a scientific experiment and then derive an illogical conclusion from it. It has never been the actual scientific results that have been contradictory to the Scholastic positions put forward, it always comes from faulty reasoning derived from those results that can be easily shown to be faulty once the actual line of argumentation is revealed.
It is the same with Spinoza and his philosophy, people on here claim that Spinoza totally wrecked the scholastics and yet
when asked about it we ultimately get no real arguments for his positions. Like always the anti-scholastic narratives fall apart when they are engaged in on a serious intellectual level instead of just according to a vague meta-narrative.
Scholastics, at even their most dogmatic, would admit when they were being dogmatic and had no actual arguments for their positions. It is incredible how often people on this board complain about scholastic dogmatism and then can't even back up their anti-scholastic position
>>451615
>>451544
You got your reasoning why perspective and relativity is the rule of the universe through Einstein. Look up relativity. There is no truth outside of object subject relationship. Not even mathemtically truths. The absolute truths about object relationships Aquinas wants only exist in his mind. This is why everyone who knows about science dismisses him outright.
The case for monoism is that every thing you could possible think of is not contained in only one thing (exception God). So for instance knowledge exists in multiple people, knowledge has it's own traits which exist in things other than knowledge. Nothing is entirely self-contained except for the one super-set that is the God or Nature. It doesn't matter what new terms or items come into existence they are limited by the subject object relationship. The only exception is God which is it's own subject and has all traits and properties you can imagine. Than you need to introduce subject made distinctions but these distinctions are no objective but subjective (see Einstein again)
Anything beyond this is going to take some reading on your half. I am not trying to convert you to Spinozism, you are free to ignore it. However when something is being shoved in your face (like obnoxious Catholics) it is up to them to prove it. And guess what, they are not obligated to accept any axioms. The first mover arguement is loaded with axioms that are not proven. Saying that Aquinas words are sophistry is a perfectly valid position. Apart from that, and this is just my personal opinion, everything about scholasticism and especially Aquinas seems dishonest. In general Catholicism is a dishonest religion. So you don't start the debate in a neutral position, you start in the negative and need to earn respect. I think most people also have that idea and it's why scholastic fan-boys are treated like retards, the church earned it's anti-intellectual reputation.
>>451755
>You got your reasoning why perspective and relativity is the rule of the universe through Einstein. Look up relativity.
But again, I’m not convinced that you even understand Einstein, or really have a case through Einstein against Thomas, because you aren’t connecting any of the dots here.
>There is no truth outside of object subject relationship. Not even mathemtically truths.
Including the truth that “There is no truth outside of object subject relationship.” How exactly does that work ?
>The case for monoism is that.....
Everything I can think of other than God is not contained in more than one thing, my soul/mind is mine alone, no one has it, my substance is mine alone as well. There are different cases of knowledge in different people but the knowledge is clearly different, if our knowledge is not distinct then we should know the exact same things perfectly, there should only be one intellect instead of multiple intellects. So yes there are different instances of knowledge in different things, but these are still distinct instances- almost invariably with a different content ultimately. My soul and substance may be causally upheld and derived from God, but there is no reason why they should be contained in God.
Why should we buy into nature being God anyways? We know that there are countless contingencies not realized by nature, and we have good reason to think that given that most of our natural contingencies like laws are not logically necessary that they need something to maintain their continued existence. If something is contingent then there needs to be an explanation for why it persists, but nature and all of its laws are radically contingent. So why would we buy into the idea that nature is our fundamental level of reality/ God?
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>>451894
>It doesn't matter what new terms or items come into existence they are limited by the subject object relationship.
Epistemically maybe, you’ve yet to demonstrate what this has to do with ontology. I can admit that so as long as there are subjects those subjects have a subject/object relationship to other objects, but this hardly means that this computer screen only exists because I look at it. The fact that us being subjects means that we always get our knowledge of the world through our subjectivity has nothing to do with the ultimate metaphysical constitution of reality.
>The only exception is God which is it's own subject and has all traits and properties you can imagine. Than you need to introduce subject made distinctions but these distinctions are no objective but subjective (see Einstein again)
As far as I know of Einstein’s work he showed us how there are several frames of reference that are distinct in regards to the speed we are going at, so and that time and space are relativistic rather than absolute.
Say a train is travelling at 6/10ths the speed of light. We have a ground observer who is viewing a train, we have a 2nd observer who is stationed on the train. Two lightning bolts strike the train, one at each end. The ground observer will see the bolts simultaneously, but the train observer will actually see the lightning bolt in the front of the train before the one in back due to the high speed he is moving at towards that bolt.
This is the kind of result you get from relativity theory, you seem to be applying it way past what it actually grounds to move it from a result about time/speed and perception, and are trying to ground ontological truths without showing me how this is to be done. This is why I ask, what parts of relativity theory are doing this work for you?
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>>451896
>Anything beyond this is going to take some reading on your half. I am not trying to convert you to Spinozism, you are free to ignore it.
I’m genuinely interested in what Spinoza had to say, I also think it is good form to back up your own propositions as well as you can. But fine, I will just go read Spinoza on my own I guess.
> However when something is being shoved in your face (like obnoxious Catholics) it is up to them to prove it.
How is Catholicism being shoved in your face ?, we make threads for our own enjoyment and intellectual endeavors, no one forces you into these threads. We are also fine making a case for our beliefs as is obvious by this thread. It is just annoying that our intellectual adversaries are generally not willing to do the same and still have the audacity to call us the dogmatic ones.
>And guess what, they are not obligated to accept any axioms. The first mover arguement is loaded with axioms that are not proven.
Every time an axiom has been called into question it has been defended. The only major one in the first mover argument is that something cannot be the cause of its own motion, which I backed up with an argument here >>450421.
>Saying that Aquinas words are sophistry is a perfectly valid position.
If it was valid it would have to not be riddled with logical errors on just what Aquinas’ positions were and what is wrong with them.
>Apart from that, and this is just my personal opinion, everything about scholasticism and especially Aquinas seems dishonest. In general Catholicism is a dishonest religion. So you don't start the debate in a neutral position, you start in the negative and need to earn respect.
Well that just proves my point. You place your own prejudices over proper debate and intellectual honesty. But fine, Catholics are getting back into intellectual shape while our opponents fall further and further behind every day because they think that we aren’t worth taking seriously. So be it.
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>>451439
>laws of physics are an appeal to authority.
Kek.
Only if you build them up to be the absolute truth, and not subject to new evidence.
If you are arguing under the understanding that they are subject to change, however unlikley, and this would necessitate revision of your argument, you should be good.
>>450573
>Well ok if you think that basic logical principles like the principle of non-contradiction don't need to hold then I'm sure where this debate can go. According to you none of your other statements hold then. You are literally claiming that "x is P and not P" in unequivocal terms is a valid sentence.
I'm not doubting the principle of non contradiction, I'm doubting your application of the principle, I dont see why something cant be in potency and act as if it was in potency, in fact I can find objects that manage this very feat by linear superposition of kaon mixing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaon#Mixing.
>Yes but this is where your problem is. If we find that physics has uncaused phenomena or causes that are not spatio-temporally concurrent with their effect, then you have to demonstrate why we should treat this as representing the real phenomena, rather than just a limit in what physics can tell us about that phenomena.
For the proof of violation of spatio-temporal causality we already have Bell's theorem (or rather Bell's inequality) we've spent the last century demonstrating that hidden variable models (which would preserve spatio-temporal causal structure) cannot describe the observational evidence provided by entanglement. At this point local hidden variables have been virtually disproven, while global hidden variables are on the rocks (currently the best current defence is a many worlds theory, which as a scientific theory is non-demonstrable, and as such the very far end of speculative scientific theory.
>How is this consequent determined ? How do you determine that Gods causal activity would be determinable in the same way a creatures activity would.
Congratulations you just formulated a unique category of causation that only god fills, by making this argument you have undermined the very basis of the argument of the prime mover, which is the notion of a natural derivation of a god.
>>450486
Agreed, here's an amusing quote on the matter:
"The first assumption of all metaphysics is, that by dialectic development of any concept a whole system can be evolved. Of course the initial concept, the apriori, is generally unsound, so there is no need to mention the deductions. But since it is very difficult in the realm of abstract thought to distinguish a lie from truth, metaphysical systems often have a very convincing appearance. The chief defect only appears incidentally, when the taste for dialectic play becomes blunted in man... Therefore, those who are interested in the success of metaphysics must always encourage the opinion that a taste for dialectics is a high distinction in a man, proving the loftiness of his soul." -Lev Shestov, "All Things are Possible" segment 23
It is rare that an atheist can compete in apologetics, we just aren't as invested in it.
>>452243
> I dont see why something cant be in potency and act as if it was in potency
Im not sure if you formulated this the way you meant to...
To be in potency to x at tn is to be such that at n you do not have x yet but have the capacity to have it at n+1, to be actually x at tn is to have x at n. You have to be willing to posit that an object both has x at tn and does not have x at tn in the exact same sense of "having x" for your claim to work out.
>in fact I can find objects that manage this very feat by linear superposition of kaon mixing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaon#Mixing.
Can you explain exactly how this would work ?. How does kaon mixing entail that something is both x and is not x at the same time in the exact same way?
>For the proof of violation of spatio-temporal causality we already have Bell's theorem...
That doesn't answer my question. I need to know why I should treat the limits of our current physics as the limits of my ontology, saying that we have gotten such and such a result in physics has nothing to do with the question that I asked.
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>>452334
>Congratulations you just formulated a unique category of causation that only god fills, by making this argument you have undermined the very basis of the argument of the prime mover, which is the notion of a natural derivation of a god.
You'll have to unpack this more. This does'nt do anything against my argument as it stands. That I have
> formulated a unique category of causation that only god fills
doesn't entail that
>(I) have undermined the very basis of the argument of the prime mover,which is the notion of a natural derivation of a god.
The whole point of the argument is that nature is not self sufficient but needs something beyond it. Not that God is part of nature. Right from the start the argument posits God as the only being who acts as a first cause. That there is something unique about God's causation that nothing else satisfies is the meat of the argument as it is.
The point is that you argued that if there was an external actor on this allegedly self moving thing that we would be able to know about it. I pointed out that in order for us to know this we would have to know A. the state of a thing before being acted upon, and B. the state of a thing after being acted upon. If it is true that God acted on everything in the first place, then it would be impossible for us to get A, therefore the best we could do is get a qualified version of A insofar as A is such that creatures have yet to act on it, while God has already acted on it and only in that way could we make the distinction. But because of this the experiment you mentioned cannot count as means to show the existence of self motion in nature, because the evidence cannot tell us if things we presume to be in state A are in A in the qualified or the unqualified sense. The actual evidence is silent on this matter.
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>>452334
Kaon mixing 101; I have two states we'll call these K1 and K2, and via a process I can freely move between these two states. However the action of moving between these states is random. As a result if we start the system in K1 and let it evolve we end up in a linear superposition of K1 and K2. In your language at n we do not have x, but at n+1 we have both K1 and K2 in linear superposition, then when you perform a measurement you retrieve one of the two with some probability. Quantum mechanics is not obviously compatable with local realism, it's why it tends to provide easy counter examples to metaphysical arguments that rely on language conventions (for example, it is impossible to formulate a counter argument to the prime mover in greek due to grammatical form).
>How does kaon mixing entail that something is both x and is not x at the same time in the exact same way?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_superposition
> I need to know why I should treat the limits of our current physics as the limits of my ontology
Bell's Theorem isn't physics, we just started applying it because it provides a rigorous proof of violation of causality within a light cone, we applied it to the epistemic aspect of physical experiment after predicting it with the partial ontology provided by theory and found that currently all experiments we expect to violate a Bell's inequality do, and all experiments we dont expect to violate a bell inequality dont.
1/2
>>452445
>You'll have to unpack this more. This does'nt do anything against my argument as it stands. That I have
The major conjectures of the argument of the prime mover is that all things can be reduced to the action on something actual to bring forth a potential. By defining some new form of action which only god possesses you've just brought forth the notion of special pleading that something cannot be uncaused, because (in your argument) god can act to cause it in a way we cannot perceive.
This argument in itself is designed to be untestable; there is no way I can distinguish between a truly uncaused event and your new definition of an action which only god may invoke.
As a result you've moved the goal posts, there are now actions, actuals, potentials and actions* where actions* are a special class of actions that may only be performed by god, may not be detected, and are only invoked when an otherwise uncaused event (of which there are many) occur.
In either case, your continued argument is that (if I'm reading this correctly) somehow we cant know the initial state A under the premise that a god has already acted on it. This argument leads back to one of two conclusions; firstly delayed action is not a thing in any physics, this action is yet another action* variable. Secondly in order for this to work, every singly particle in the universe must know all information about every single other particle in the universe. This is an example of a Bohmian non-local hidden variable theory and you very quickly run into problems about general information theory by following that route (people have tried)
2/2
>>451901
>Well that just proves my point. You place your own prejudices over proper debate and intellectual honesty.
You do not get to decide what other people think of you. I'm telling you how people think/ I'm explaining the way you the universe is and you are complaining that it works out the way it does.
I haven't gotten my idea that most Catholics are intellectual light-weights because it's something something I assumed. It's the overwhelming result of talking with dozens of Catholics and looking at their most core beleifs and what they have done in history. A group reaps what i sowes. While I am perfectly willing to give each new Catholic a chance (and I think most people agree there) you need to understand that you won't always get to start in a neutral light. Jumping and down won't fix it, people make judgements based on their past experiences. There might be some people that view in a positive light...or in a more negative one (the majority opinion I assume).
Again this doesn't mean people will not consider your views but that's part of the price you pay for being part of a group. You have official beliefs, which means yes. We can per-judge you, as a matter of fact if you do not share these official beleifs than you are a bad Catholic. If it is deemed the official beliefs are retarded (for instance your beliefs in cannibalism or that the Pope can become the voice of God whenever he wills it)...than as someone that follows the office beleifs are also retarded.
I'll also add this, the apologetic revisionism of Catholics is disgusting; both with the every day Catholics trying to scrub their shameful moments out of history and with the highg level priests trying to lie about how scandals. I've never encountered a more dishonest religion, including Islam. Again this doesn't mean I'll axiomatically assume what a Catholic says is a liar. It means I'm going to be more suspicious of you than any other religion.
>>453848
>You do not get to decide what other people think of you. I'm telling you how people think/ I'm explaining the way you the universe is and you are complaining that it works out the way it does.
You're spouting opinions based on your understanding of history and your interactions with a minority of the billion+ Catholics in the world.
By the way, being an intellectual heavyweight means nothing, spiritually.
>>453872
Dude you missed the point AGAIN. It's not just me doing this. It's everyone doing this and even if were to treat every Catholic I met as tabula rasa it wouldn't mean everyone else would do it right? You understand that right.
And dude this is how the world works. I'm not going to axiomatically assume every 16 year old boy plays video games but if I meet a 16 year old boy I'll probably think it's more likely than not.
That's how people think. They look for patterns. If you keep meeting dishonest Catholics it means they will think the next Catholic they meet might be dishonest. But it's even more blatant than that. As I said Catholics have official beliefs, it means we can know things about you before we meet you (for instance that you believe in Papal infallibility).
Stop whining about it, suck it up.
>By the way, being an intellectual heavyweight means nothing, spiritually.
But it does. If you have a shallow understanding of the world you are going to have a shallow understanding of it's spiritual aspect. In general I don't view Catholics as very spiritually deep, they are better than Protestants for sure! Although what you have done with Mary is good, it's good to have a Goddess figure (yes I know she is not officially a goddess, but if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, etc.)
>>453914
>You understand that right.
I don't care what people think about Catholics. You're not trying to find the truth about the Church, you're parroting anti-Catholic propaganda points.
>I'm not going to axiomatically assume every 16 year old boy plays video games but if I meet a 16 year old boy I'll probably think it's more likely than not.
On what basis?
>If you have a shallow understanding of the world you are going to have a shallow understanding of it's spiritual aspect.
But most of what you've written betrays an alarming amount of unawareness on your part of both the way the world works ("all sixteen year olds are likely to be gamers; therefore most Catholics are likely to be idiots") and of spirituality ("Spinoza's rejection of organized spirituality allows us to grasp the truth of spirituality"). I don't see any reason to take what you say seriously. Jewish pedophiles exist, too, but you aren't whining about how Jews collaborate to protect members of the Jewish community from antisemitism.
>>445008
>Spinoza
kek. meme-philosopher
>>453955
Welcome to epistemics, given that there exists no complete ontology, this represents the current best method we have for figuring out how shit works.
I start with an ignorance prior P(video) = 0.5, P(not video) = 0.5, and my prior distribution I select to be a normalised decaying exponential; Z e^{-age/b} But I have not yet met anyone
Now I meet a 16 year old, this person plays video games, so I do a bayesian update; P(video games|16) = P(16 | video games) P(video games)/P(16)
With no prior information, P(16|video games) = 1, P(video games) = 0.5, and P(16) I get from my prior distribution Z e^{16/b}.
This gives me my current probability, from the data I have observed that a 16 year old will play video games. By iterating this method over many interactions with people of a range of ages I may accurately predict the probability with which a 16 year old will play video games.
>>454806
I guess I'm just dealing with a retard. Nobody actually goes through this thought process.
>>454828
Actually people do, you just dont realise it; pattern recognition is based off this principle and brains are virtually just pattern recognising machines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem
>>454852
Eh, it just seems to me like you can't actually make the assumption that your perception of these things is accurate. You're basically just saying that your personal experiences with Catholics and sixteen years olds are more valid than hard data that you could in princiole collect about these groups, which I don't find acceptable at all.
>>454871
I'm not actually the person from the catholics, I just like epistmics. The process above is the same process that gets applied to hard data, the only difference being the sample size (even then, most surveys only sample about 1000 people because that generally gets enough information to reduce the error enough for useful results, it wouldnt be hard to meet more 16 year old or catholics than are surveyed if you're sufficiently old)
>>444270
A joke
>>452494
1.
From reading your description and a bit of the link on Quantum Superposition ( I watched the video and skimmed through it a bit- I have Christmas shopping to do still) I don’t think that you have provided a counter example here.
First of all, only one of the two states is actually recorded so I see no reason to posit that both contrary states are actually simultaneously being realized. To demonstrate that there really is superposition they send a wave to it which causes it to alternate between the two states and we average out the difference between the states as the thing switches back and forth between the two. This seems to be how they get the idea that a state is p and not p at the same time. But this is obviously a misrepresentation. If we are dealing with energy levels, like in the video then say we have state 1 as energy level 1 and state 2 as energy level 3, all this shows is that some point during the oscillations it was at energy level 2, not that it was simultaneously at energy level 1 and not at energy 1 at some instant
Again just looking through the wiki page
>Continuing with this example: If a particle can be in state up and down, it can also be in a state where it is an amount 3i/5in up and an amount 4/5 in down.
This “middle ground” between two states that shows up at some point is very different from being simultaneously x and not x at the exact same time.
As far as Bell’s theorem goes I’m not sure why I should link up predictability of results in an artificial experimental setting to granting truth in regards to fundamental ontology.
>>455657
2.
For your claim that I have committed special pleading, this is not so, I need no new kind of actuality in my argument. Actuality and potency are general principles that cover all instances of change- there are always more specific properties that will be included in their actual instances, nothing is ever just “in act” it is always “in act to x”- likewise I’ve added no property, I’ve suggested that this property would simply be one that is already inherent in things before creatures have acted on them. What I am saying is that whatever specific physical property you use to determine that a thing has not been acted on could still be something that comes from God’s initial creation/acting on the thing. So we would have no way to know of the alleged state when nothing has actually acted on the thing in question. It certainly is untestable, we have to be rigorous in pointing out where scientific experimentation cannot actually support one competing theory over the other. This is one of those cases. I have moved no goal posts; the first way requires no reformulation what so ever in light of the emptiness of the experiment in regards to determining that something has been unqualifiedly acted upon since it deals only with act and potency in general.
>In either case, your continued argument is that (if I'm reading this correctly) somehow we cant know the initial state A under the premise that a god has already acted on it.
We can’t know if something has been acted on unqualifiedly or not, yes.
>This argument leads back to one of two conclusions; firstly delayed action is not a thing in any physics, this action is yet another action* variable.
This you’ll need to unpack, what does delayed action not being a thing in physics have to do with anything ?
>>455662
3.
>Secondly in order for this to work, every singly particle in the universe must know all information about every single other particle in the universe.
How doe particles “know” anything? And why would this be the case?
> This is an example of a Bohmian non-local hidden variable theory and you very quickly run into problems about general information theory by following that route (people have tried)
Elaborate
Another thing I would like to know is that given that obviously quantum phenomena is radically distinct and even contradictory to what we experience in the macroworld, why should we treat the quantum phenomena as more fundamental or real than our macro phenomena ? I would argue that given that the macro phenomena is not filtered through mathematical abstractions and experimentation that isolates elements of reality from each other that there is more reason to treat what we have in regards to quantum phenomena as a construction that highlights certain elements we are interested in at the expense of others, where our macro level should be what is treated as fundamental to our ontology.
>>455665
4.
Given that identity is generally structurally oriented- i.e if you break something down past the level of its fundamental parts, say breaking down water past H20 molecules, then you no longer have the identity of water. It seems to follow that what is fundamental to the way things work is its top down structure, from its “form” to its material parts. The further down you go from the macro world the more you are going to touch upon things that are derivative to it. Trying to isolate these parts down past the formal structures they inhere in may tell us something about how they seem to act alone, but given that reality as a whole is oriented top down it would seem to be an empty enterprise to try to determine a fundamental ontology based on things isolated down at such a low material level at the expense of the macro level. Things at lower levels need to be reconciled with things at higher levels. So I think rather than claiming that a metaphysics based on the macro world needs to be reconciled with things on the quantum level, it ought to be the other way around. Things like superposition obviously don’t seem to be the case on the macro-level, and it doesn’t seem like we have a very good understanding of how to deal with this. So I would suggest that before we try to make conclusions about reality in general based on quantum phenomena that we gain more understanding on how it can reconciled with the macroworld and other disciplines outside of itself.
fin
>>453848
You are explaining that people value their own prejudices over intellectual honesty. You don't know what my actual beliefs are. I agree with Aquinas and the Church on many issues, but I'm actually undecided on lots of catholic dogma. My main point though is that it is absurd to call Catholics dishonest/dogmatic when we will actually give serious arguments where often our opponents simply appeal to authority or parrot vague historical narratives on things they've barely even studied.
>>455717
If a Catholic actually says something respectable I'll respect it, I just have learned to not expect it. I'm sure if I said that I think most Catholics are wonderful honest people you would have no problems. Only someone who is deeply insecure really cares about being loved by everyone. The constant need to have your religion acknowledged and respected really just communicates to me that it's not a respectable religion. Things that are great do not require apologetics, their deeds speak for themself. It is only when you have no noble deeds that you need to engage in apologetics. It's bewildering that you have Catholics that are 'proud' apologetics.
>>455816
What's your background? What's as important to you as religion is to a religious person? What things constitute your psychic identity?
>>455826
paranoid and vengeful Catholic detected.
>>455657
1
>Only one of the two states is actually recorded
I'm not entirely sure what video you went to watch on this, but if you have the time I strongly suggest you go through the mathematics
Ok, let's clear up the differences here quickly between quantum and classical concepts; yes when you perform a measurement the superposition collapses to a single result, however prior to the measurement your state is indeterminate.
An easy example of this can be found by the following method; I have a series of people all of whom are given an integer number and I wish to know if the final number is odd or even. The constraint is that each person may only pass a single bit of classical information. Obviously the solution is to agree a basis (0 is even, 1 is odd or vice versa) and use this information to pass along the line until I get my result.
Now I give each person a non integer number with the constraint that they will add to an integer number and I permit the passing of a single quantum bit (a qubit), I now have a continuous space between 0->1->0 and I may preform the same procedure as above, addition without observation; but my measurement result is still {0,1}. As a result we can show that this isn't in fact a "middle ground state" but rather a linear superposition of both states (in our particular basis). As a result, prior to measurement if you ask whether the system is in the state 0 or the state 1 there is no defined answer of "yes it is in 1" or "no it is not in 1", it's a mixture of these two.
>As far as Bell’s theorem goes I’m not sure why I should link up predictability of results in an artificial experimental setting to granting truth in regards to fundamental ontology.
Bell's theorem provides a method by which local hidden variable models may be eliminated, allowing for the verification of causal links outside the light cone of an event. The limitation that it does provide is that you cannot violate the lightcone for the transmission of information.
>>455662
2
>For your claim that I have committed special pleading, this is not so, I need no new kind of actuality in my argument.
First I define an action as a morphism from an object within the category of actuals to another actual via an associated potential. Actions may be either caused or uncaused.
The premise of the argument proposed is that all actions are caused, when I submitted examples of demonstrably uncaused (pure random) actions, you asserted that they were in fact caused in such a manner as to be undetectable caused, that is to say that you invented a category of actions which we will term actions* that are caused but not detectable to explain away all such actions that previously held the property uncaused.
This immediately makes the entire argument circular, and that your particular addition to it becomes special pleading. Laying it out in full:
We seek to prove the existence of god by stating that all things are caused
If something is uncaused, then it is in fact caused because god did it undetectably
Your addition is special pleading for the statement that the causation is undetectable, this is a non falsifiable statement that you've just applied to the category that was otherwise disputing you; I can make the statement "there is no causation there is just undetectable randomness that gives the appearance of causation" and by making this statement would be performing the same feat.
>We can’t know if something has been acted on unqualifiedly or not, yes.
Doesn't matter, we can isolate invariants and measure those interdependently of the rest of the system (Noether's theorem)
>>455816
I don't care about your personal opinions on Catholics or the church, what I care about is that you often seem to allow your personal opinions to excuse yourself seriously engaging in arguments and actually showing that you can support your views in a debate.
>Things that are great do not require apologetics, their deeds speak for themself.
If you are talking about a descriptive claim about reality you need to back it up to others who don't agree with you if you are going to debate them on it. Whether or not the Trinity is a coherent doctrine or if God exists and similar ideas have nothing to do with your opinion on whether the Church has acted in a noble way or not. And your opinion on the Church has nothing to do with those issues. Likewise if you are going to claim that Spinoza's monism successfully disbars Aquinas' system you should be able to actually demonstrate it, rather than just asserting it and telling others to go read Spinoza, or telling others that there is some vague link to Einstein without explaining exactly what that is, and using that as evidence for your assertion. If someone says that " Spinoza showed that all the scholastic distinctions were actually man made" they should be able to explain just what those distinctions were and exactly how Spinoza showed them to only be man made. If someone wants to say that a certain scientific theory shows that Thomism is wrong they should be able to explain just how this experiment applies to the issue at hand and why we should take its results as being important enough to deny the argument put forward for that position in Thomism.
The hypocrisy comes in when you have Scholastics readily supporting- in detail- every assertion they make while simultaneously being called dogmatic by people who have to be endlessly probed just to give substantial arguments for their positions, and think that some vague historical narratives are enough to excuse them from seriously engaging.
>>455665
3
>This you’ll need to unpack, what does delayed action not being a thing in physics have to do with anything ?
The state of a system at time t+h is only dependant on the system, and all things interacting with the system at time t, where lim h -> 0; your assertion that assuming some god initially acted on this system makes it's initial state somehow indeterminate, or cause what we otherwise consider to be an uncaused action requires a violation of this.
As we're violating regular causality, we once again return to this action falling under the blanket of action*.
>How doe particles “know” anything? And why would this be the case?
The alternative to breaking the light cone is the notion that the particles all have complete knowledge of all elements of the system and its evolution and act using this knowledge for their own evolution.
As for how particles know anything; how do magnets know when each other are near and then know to interact? (Well we can get involved in gauge bosons and such, but the general notion is that this is another unfalsifiable theory; a perfect actor filling their role in a perfect script is indistinguishable from a real person responding to stimuli)
>>455665
4
>Another thing I would like to know is that given that obviously quantum phenomena is radically distinct and even contradictory to what we experience in the macroworld, why should we treat the quantum phenomena as more fundamental or real than our macro phenomena ?
Macrophenomena are (almost all, we've still got problems with gravity) demonstrably scaled quantum phenomena, quantum mechanics is a strictly more correct model than classical physics because it contains the entire set of classical physics and correctly identifies things that classical physics does not.
An easy example of this is the photoelectric effect; when shining light on a metal I observe that on occasion (classical) electrons will be emitted from the metal. The classical prediction is that if the energy from the light is enough this will be observed, and thus increasing the intensity (shining more lights) will cause this (Remembering that classical light is a field and that the energy of the field is additive).
The quantum prediction is that only one photon may interact with a single electron at a time, the energy of the photon (its frequency) must be high enough to individually excite the electron to leave. You can go and test this and find that the classical depiction is blatantly not correct and that the quantum one works. And from this we get quantisation of photons. Classical macroscale models are not "privileged" above quantum ones because they are fundamentally not correct, but do provide accurate enough solutions for most problems as to be usable.
>>446427
>potential ice cannot make your drink colder.
What?
Hello, I'm Thomas Aquinas and I can't fathom pouring cold river water into literally any liquid.
>>455717
>Given that identity is generally structurally oriented- i.e if you break something down past the level of its fundamental parts, say breaking down water past H20 molecules, then you no longer have the identity of water.
Identity is a label you or I apply to something physical to make it easier to understand; the action of a collection of bound quarks that form nucleons and exchange mesons to form the nuclei of each of the atoms that exchange electrons to bind together to form a water molecule is invariant. I can treat the entire thing as a collection of the smallest types without altering its behaviour; or I can treat it as a single molecule and get a less accurate result.
That is, that if I just consider it to be a water molecule (and I'm glad you picked that example because water is the second worst thing in chemistry to try and model as a purely non-quantum object) on the macro scale I will get inaccurate results. Macro scale models exist because quantum mechanics is hard and sometimes I want an answer that is correct enough without wasting months of computational time to obtain it.
So no, you dont get to duck quantum just because you dont think it's realisable on the large scale, the first thing that people did when quantum theory was developed was spend a quarter of a century making sure that it still fit with all previous macroscale models (or to see where violations occurred which one was correct; quantum has been every time so far).
>>444270
For me, if I still had my faith, God is simply the illusive creator of all, who leaves clues to his existence, and reveals himself to a chosen few. His reasoning, or whatever lies beyond, would be so far out of our comprehension that it would be pointless to try and think about it from our perspective. Like imagining a new color.
>>445381
Craig usually says this argument only gets you to a omnipotent creator of the universe. He doesn't to my knowledge argue that Kalam gets you a Christian god or even a non-deistic one. He does however have arguments to make the Christian god a Reasonable faith.
He did recently address this but I'm on my phone.
>>455987
1.
The video I watched was on the Wikipedia page.
Even saying that “ it is a mixture of the two states” doesn’t really seem to manage what it is supposed to in your argument though. It would actually be that intermediate mixture- the sum of both states, as opposed to being actually that first state and potentially that first state( which entails it not being that state) at the same time. I also don’t see how the results of the experiment you suggested deductively entails the conclusion that we have superposition as opposed to a “middle ground state”. It is hard to see how the lack of a defined result in the early part of the experiment entails that something is both p and not p at one and the same time, especially if what is going on is that we just can’t actually determine it one way or another as opposed to actually getting a clear result where we directly observe two contrary states in one thing at once. If there is allot of background science that goes into understanding how such a conclusion is reached I can look over that as well if there are links to look over, though I don’t know how long this thread will last.
Bell’s Theorem and its use makes more sense to mean, it is not entirely clear how we are determining that non spatio-temporally concurrent causation is actually happening though. You said that we would need hidden variable models in order to account for it and that such models cannot account for the observational evidence we’ve gotten from entanglement. But what is entanglement and why should I buy into it or the results that people get from it ?
>The premise of the argument proposed is that all actions are caused
This is false. The premise is that if something is changed then it is changed by something else.
>>456809
2.
>when I submitted examples of demonstrably uncaused (pure random) actions, you asserted that they were in fact caused in such a manner as to be undetectable caused, t
No I pointed out that your cited experiment actually can’t determine if such actions actually exist. I made no statement myself on what was going on with what you were measuring. This is simply a logical possibility that your experiment is unable to deal with and must be silent on due to that. Given that the experiment cannot count as evidence I don’t have to make any alteration to my initial argument. It is simply a moot point.
>We seek to prove the existence of god by stating that all things are caused
Is false. The argument is that given that there are cases of change in the world you need an umoved mover who does not himself change.
>If something is uncaused, then it is in fact caused because god did it undetectably
This simply is’nt what the argument is about. We already grant that God himself is not caused or changed. If your statement holds then we would have to hold that God acts on himself, which we don’t.
>>456810
3.
My claim would only be special pleading if I claimed that all causation is detectable except this kind of causation without giving a reason. This kind of causation would be undetectable because we would not have any means of differentiating one thing that has the corresponding property due to it and one thing that did not. Given that there is a justifiable reason why we could not detect it it is not a case of special pleading, but rather it is justified to point out such an inability inherent in the data so to get the conclusion you want. It would be like if someone did a statistic where they claimed that 5% of a group were involved in violent crime according to data that said that 5% of the group were accused of violent crime, the fact that a differentiation is not being made between those who were acquitted and those who were not would show that the claim being based on the data is false because the data was inconclusive, and we should not buy into the claim, if you can’t differentiate between these possible cases then your experiment simply can’t be used to support such a claim.
Now if you wanted to take a position that there is an undetectable randomness that only gives the illusion of causation then you would have to motivate why we should buy into that. Our reason to buy into the idea that there would be this other kind of causation is because everything we experience in the macroworld follows suit in needing something to change it when it is changed, hence when we find phenomena that doesn’t follow suit- and is the result of mathematical abstractions and experimentation, we have good reason to be suspicious of it, your hypothetical statement on the other hand has no prima facie appeal because we experience a non-random universe.
>>456811
4.
>Doesn't matter, we can isolate invariants and measure those interdependently of the rest of the system (Noether's theorem)
How could you in the case that I was describing? How could you isolate something that would be equally present in everything?
>The state of a system at time t+h is only dependant on the system, and all things interacting with the system at time t, where lim h -> 0; your assertion that assuming some god initially acted on this system makes it's initial state somehow indeterminate, or cause what we otherwise consider to be an uncaused action requires a violation of this.
I don’t see how this inference is valid given the first mover argument. God is constantly acting on everything in creation. The whole point of the first mover argument is that you have a God who is constantly in act on all of creation. The first mover isn’t just a first cause at the beginning of time( the argument accepts that we may have infinite past time), it is a first cause who is acting on everything at every moment as the first conserving cause. So God would be interacting with the system at T.
>The alternative to breaking the light cone is the notion that the particles all have complete knowledge of all elements of the system and its evolution and act using this knowledge for their own evolution.
Can you relate this more tightly with the argument at hand? How does what I suggested deny breaking the light cone ? For the “how” particles and magnets “know” you seem to be using “know” in an analogous sense. Is’nt there just a regularity in nature that magnets happen to attract each other?, it is not as if they have knowledge, they just contingently do things according to a natural regularity.
>>456814
5.
Being able to cover the phenomena that classical physics does and more doesn’t really give an answer to my question. Classical physics was already just mathematical abstractions that isolate the quantifiable regularities in nature. Being able to correspond to those mathematical abstractions is not the same as being reconcilable with the actual phenomena that these abstract models are being based on.
>I can treat the entire thing as a collection of the smallest types without altering its behaviour; or I can treat it as a single molecule and get a less accurate result.
How does your getting “more accurate results” in an experimental setting mean anything for fundamental ontology and if reality is oriented top down or bottom up in terms of mereological ( composition based) and supervenience ( property based) structures ? You are making an unjustified jump from experimental results to ontology. This goes into some more fundamental questions in the Philosophy of Science. I am much more anti-realist than many, but I don't see a particularly good reason not be.
Thank you for going this in depth though, I genuinely do appreciate it.
>>456809
1.
Ground states are measurable; if the system existed in a "middle ground state" then you wouldn't obtain measurement results 0 and 1, you'd obtain the middle ground state as a possible outcome with probability 1. As a result for a selected basis the state is in a superposition, not in any other ground state.
(For a full understanding of this you need some background in hamiltonian mechanics and dirac formalism)
Once you get superposition states the question of whether something is in |1> or not |1> is no longer well defined; absolutism stops working.
>Bell’s Theorem and its use makes more sense to mean, it is not entirely clear how we are determining that non spatio-temporally concurrent causation is actually happening though.
We define spatio-temporal causation by light cones, that is the fastest possible time for one object to become aware of another event. Anything outside this breaks regular causal models.
Entanglement allows me to perform an operation on a pair of quantum states such that they become a single mathematical object, some easy linear algebra can be employed here.
I have an initial pair of states [a, b] and [c,d] which I combine into the same system (tensor product) [ac ad bc bd]. where ab and cd are normalised superposition states of some basis, such that |q> = a|0> + b|1> and the same for c and d. (note that 0<= a,b,c,d <= 1 and a^2 + b^2 = 1, c^2 + d^2 = 1)
I'm now going to take a = 1, b = 0, c = 1, d = 0 and perform a CNOT gate on the resulting state giving an output [1,0,0,1]. I need you to find values of a,b,c and d such that the product state (one describable as the tensor product of two individual states) is equal to this new entangled state (termed a bell state). Note that for now we're going to ignore normalisation factors for the ease of the argument.
This resulting bell state cannot be described as a combination of two states anymore; your original states are entangled as a single quantum state.
>>457099
2.
Now our Bell state has some interesting properties when measured. When I measure one of the qubits that make up the state it will return |1> or |0>, but when I measure the other one (for the [1,0,0,1] state) it will always return the opposite state. For a Bell state [1,0,1,0] both qubits will always return the same state.
Testing causality is then simple, I entangle my qubits in a known bell state (I get to pick which one), move the individual qubits some distance apart and then measure both of them. By performing the measurements and obtaining the results faster than light can travel between the two measurement sites I can then verify that we've got causal relations outside the light cone.
Hidden variable models arose as an attempt to explain this without breaking causality, the states share information when they interact and continue their evolution using this information, when measured both states are acting on the same information and as a result their evolution has been the same and causality has not been broken. Unfortunately there is an easy counter example; taking our Bell state from above, I can now perform unitary operations on the qubits of the state; if entanglement works then the state of the second qubit will also be altered, if hidden variable theory works it will not be.
As it turns out, hidden variable theory doesnt hold and we continue to violate light cones.
Bohmian hidden variables then attempt to cover this by explaining that all particles have complete information about the rest of the universe and evolve using this information (i.e. the other entangled particle knows what you're doing and acts using this information it obtained at a prior point that does not violate causality). This is the last hidden variable model that has not been disproven, it's also currently non falsifiable and as a result is not technically a scientific theory.
>>456809
3.
>The premise of the argument proposed is that all actions are caused
This is false. The premise is that if something is changed then it is changed by something else.
I think this is a semantic difference; I define action as something that evokes a change, and cause as the notion of the action of another body. But I can use these semantics if you prefer.
>No I pointed out that your cited experiment actually can’t determine if such actions actually exist.
Ok, let's get a little more detail here; any interaction that occurs between two bodies within the bounds of regular physics on the quantum level has an associated uncertainty principle. While I have to conserve momentum I now have two bodies to direct it between and as a result p_0 = a + b where p_0 is our initial total momentum and a and b are the resulting momenta of the two bodies. However because we have two unknowns and one equation this gives us a distribution of possible directions and momenta that the particles can take.
Conversely a one body or self interaction has p_0 = a, and momentum is conserved, there is only one possible momenta for the resulting object to take (as in the vacuum flux polarisation case where we decay a photon into an electron and a positron then recombine them back into the photon, the momentum of the original photon must be equal to the momentum of the final photon). Your claim that this intermediary change is not uncaused as god caused it would count under physics as a two body interaction and we would not expect to see the resulting photon hold the same momenta as the original one. We can measure the initial momentum and the final momentum very easily to determine that this is the case.
So either the action of god is somehow special and does not obey regular physics (making this an action*) or this event is uncaused. The existence of action* variables leads to the argument becoming cyclic.
>>456810
4.
>This simply is’nt what the argument is about. We already grant that God himself is not caused or changed. If your statement holds then we would have to hold that God acts on himself, which we don’t
Then we redefine action* to be everything that we consider to be uncaused is now caused by god except for god himself. This just reinforces the cyclic nature of the argument.
>Given that there is a justifiable reason why we could not detect it it is not a case of special pleading, but rather it is justified to point out such an inability inherent in the data so to get the conclusion you want.
Nah, we've spent 80 years getting the data, either vacuum polarisation is either uncaused or you need action* variables, momentum measurements can be obtained with near perfect accuracy, whereas regular two body interactions produce a huge and distinctive spread (which is why particle accelerators require detectors all around the collision chamber) [apologies for the wrong terminology, but it helps with understanding]. There is a big difference between all the photons going in one direction regardless of their initial energy and the photons scattering in almost any direction. (one easy thing to do is vary the momentum of the initial photon while repeating the experiment, if there is a scattering event then the distribution changes with the initial momentum).
Again, you require one of these action* operations to reconcile a divine intervention with physics.
>How could you in the case that I was describing? How could you isolate something that would be equally present in everything?
I dont need to, I just need to perform an experiment that would demonstrate a different outcome if god was playing by the rules of regular physics, once god isn't I can force cyclicity by demonstrating that the argument from causation requires a god to enforce causation.
>>456811
5.
>we experience a non-random universe
Prove it.
Better put, I can construct a quantum state that is a superposition of a pair of basis states; measurement results will randomly be one of the basis states as dictated by the particular superposition state.
The notion that everything is random and just happens to follow what we consider to be causation is an unprovable and irrefutable ontology, so we consign what is random (spontaneous symmetry breaking on all scales) and what is random to a sufficiently diminished degree (easy example follows; suppose I have a quantum state that results in |1> 99% of the time, on the macroscale I've now got 10^23 ish states of which 99*10^21 are in the up state with probability binom(10^23, 99*10^21) 0.99^(99*10^21) 0.01^(10^23), generalising this you can even find the distribution of probable numbers of up and down measurement results. (I suggest playing around with the binomial distribution to satisfy yourself that you do indeed get peaks that nearly approximate discrete solutions as the number of objects is very large)
>How could you in the case that I was describing? How could you isolate something that would be equally present in everything?
> So God would be interacting with the system at T.
As before, a system that is not being interacted with is physically different to one that is uncaused, the claim that god is constantly interacting outside of the laws of physics then results in that action* class arising again.
>>456814
6.
>Can you relate this more tightly with the argument at hand? How does what I suggested deny breaking the light cone ?
If the particles have the prior information about what the rest of the system is supposed to do then they may act using this information and without needing to interact with the rest of the system. As an analogy imagine an actor who is outside the light cone of the rest of the play, but knows the exact timing of their performance. The actor may perform as if they were in the play despite having no information about the current state of the play just using this prior information.
> Is’nt there just a regularity in nature that magnets happen to attract each other?, it is not as if they have knowledge, they just contingently do things according to a natural regularity.
Actions of magnets are regulated by the constant exchange of gauge bosons that mediate the electromagnetic force (photons). The exchange of these objects gives rise to force acting at a distance; because an excitation of a gauge field is indeed acting between the objects over that distance. The rate of this exchange of bosons gives rise to the strength of the associated force.
>>456821
7.
>Being able to cover the phenomena that classical physics does and more doesn’t really give an answer to my question. Classical physics was already just mathematical abstractions that isolate the quantifiable regularities in nature. Being able to correspond to those mathematical abstractions is not the same as being reconcilable with the actual phenomena that these abstract models are being based on.
This is slightly more nuanced than it would first appear. Physics has two great weaknesses; the first is that mathematics is by its very nature tautological. The second is that we have a small set of objects that may only be determined experimentally (the coupling constants of the gauge bosons, the masses of fundamental particles and a few others), most of the rest of physics (and certainly the quantum mechanics discussed above) follows directly from mathematics (electro magnetism is a U(1) gauge invariant field theory, electro-weak interactions are SU(2)xU(1), strong force is SU(3)).
An easy example of this is the basic (classical) notion of distance, time and speed, mixing calculus allows us to get displacement and velocity, calculus of variations gives us lagrangians and hamiltonians and group theory gets us to general relativity, the standard model of particle physics and quantum mechanics; all from studying nothing but the motion of objects firstly in free space, then in free fall, then on a manifold.
The set of mathematical abstractions required to get to the rest of physics is reducible to 1.
The accuracy of results for different models is used in an epistemic setting as evidence for the preference of one model over another; in this case quantum over classical. If you want an ontological argument for why this is so; Bayes Theorem should provide that in sufficient quantities. (Bayes theorem and Bell's theorem are ontological, but the application of experimental data results in their use in epistemic settings).
>Say: He is Allah, the One and Only;
>Allah, the Eternal, Absolute;
>He begetteth not, nor is He begotten;
>And there is none like unto Him.(surah ikhlas)
Keeping this alive till the other anon returns
>>444270
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
>>444270
God is the underlying principle that formed the universe and wasn't formed itself. It is the simplest possible being, as such it can't posses anything even resembling a consciousness. It doesn't care about the universe, a single solar system or mere humans.
bumping.
Also when discussing issues like this how do you know when you yourself are ignorant or the other person is just using sophistry and sematics?
>>447108
cool, a rare one.
>>463674
Ask them questions and do your own research on what they're saying; also most of these arguments utilise semantics to intentionally select terminology that makes them appear more correct than they actually are; so requesting their argument in formal logic is also sometimes helpful.
>>469670
But thats kind of a problem when you consider how large the barrier to entry is to understanding these concepts. I mean scholasticism alone requires tones of time spent on monsterously dry and dense figures like Aristotle and thats not even considering the alterative sides. Whilst this might be all well and good for a university student, for those without the kind of time its a big ask
>>469775
Thankfully a good way to understand philosophy is through debate; which this website is almost entirely based around. But even if they're not prepared to spend the time reading the full works of various philosophers, they can at least glen some notion of the idea that is being put forward with a couple of seconds searching on the internet.
>>473855
Out of interest; who is the person who keeps bumping this thread?
